Oracle applications global user experience (UX). Topics for globally-savvy UX people, so that it all fits together for Oracle's worldwide customers.

Thursday Oct 06, 2011

… and neither comes off very well. I received this huge error message as I was updating my credit card details in PayPal. I was working in the English language, yet this multilingual monster came my way.

Generally, these multilingual messages cause translatability issues. Most translatable files conform to a bilingual source-target paradigm, and not a multilingual one. The single language target enables better use of language assets and flexibility with process. Of course, the arrival of CMS and GMS-based translation solves a lot the coordination problems of keeping multiple languages translation in sync. It is also possible this message was served up from a server way rather than being actually multiple translations in a single container on the file system (I didn’t view the page source). Regardless, why bother? The users working language is known.

As for those message numbers (Message 3005), are users expected to look them up and act? Generally in the enterprise applications space these numbers are only useful to help desk or support personnel or specialized functional administrators with the right security permissions to actually do something with the application in response to looking up what that number means in a knowledge base. In this case, looking up the number leads to frustration too.

Dealing with these generic application failure issues has long been a user experience issue. If would have been better to throw a shorter specific message in my working language was shown, one with a more precise title, a cause text that reflected what I was doing, and a precise action text to perform to fix the issue. An assurance that my money and other personal details were safe too should have been provided. Making that message number and some diagnostics available on demand only, and capturing any details in the background so that a security specialist or other help desk person could check that none of my data was compromised would have been preferable. At least I was not told to contact my system administrator, so I am thankful for that!